Poor old Christchurch and the Canterbury area! It's depressing news and I feel very sorry for everyone there. I'm wondering about the plight of international students. I hope they're being looked after. Most of the language schools are in the most badly damaged area - the central city.

It must be a pretty scary experience to be in a place where you have little of the language and have something like this happen - and Christchurch is the biggest centre, after Auckland, for international students. I heard reports that the police were driving around with loudspeakers as they wanted everyone out of damaged buildings that may still collapse, especially with some major aftershocks. I had to wonder - would some of the people possibly in those buildings understand what was being broadcast?

Last edited by artemisia on Sun Sep 08, 2013 8:25 am; edited 1 time in total

Yes, I hear it was quite a jolt for people down there in ChCh - the biggest Earthquake in more than 50 years and not on any known fault line. There have also been several quite noticeable after-shocks - I heard on the news yesterday that there were no injuries from the aftershocks but more than ten women went into labour after the biggest one (yesterday morning)!

The main quake measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, the same as the devastating quake in Haiti a few months ago, though for various reasons, the ChCh quake caused no fatalities and hardly any injuries. Serious damage was mainly confined to older structures, nearly all of which were unoccupied at the time of the early-morning quake. Some older shopfronts and restaurant facades have fallen off the fronts of the buildings and a few pre-1930s office buildings have been condemned for demolition because they've become unsafe. Thousands of homes and hundreds of roads throughout the local region have suffered some damage - cracks etc - and there's going to be a fair amount of building work going on over the next year. Warehouses and supermarkets have found many of their shelves collapsed, spilling the contents all over the floor.

As regards language schools, I haven't so far heard any report of serious damage - the schools reopened a couple of days after the quake. There are also no reports of any injuries to students. I'll be going down to a conference in ChCh in a couple of months, which will be held at the Polytechnic, which is right in the centre of town. Being a modern building, it's essentially unscathed and opened again a few days after the quake. The main concern was about the safety of drinking water in the city, because of breakages in the sewage and water pipes, but that's now been given the all-clear. Primary and High Schools are opening up over the next few days, now that the drinking water issue has been resolved.

Will update you all if I hear anything else. Hard to say what the effect might be on overseas students in ChCh or NZ in general.. likely to have a short-term effect, at least, on enrolments / groups of younger learners etc.

Unfortunately, Christchurch is dealing with the effects of another major earthquake (technically an aftershock following on from the 2010 earthquake, but more destructive than the main quake because of its location and closeness to ground level. A larger number of buildings in the city centre have been badly damaged and there have been over 100 confirmed fatalities, with 200 more people reported as missing. One of the buildings which collapsed housed an English language school - most of the people in the building, including several teachers and dozens of international students are presumed dead. It's possible that a third of the total fatalities will have been from that school. It's a grim situation down there right now.

I didn't know about the ESL schoo,l teachers, and students. Brings it closer to home somehow. It could have been any of us. Brings a tear to my eye to think of all those ykids who went to the other side of the world to study English in a quiet, pretty NZ city only to meet a a fate such as this. Can you imagine their poor families awaiting news, but really knowing? My heart goes out to them.